Morning and Evening Pics

We had a tough slog of a walk yesterday after not having the best night for either of us. Nevertheless we dragged ourselves around the block. We found a few flower pictures in the park.

I took the first two, but Sue knocked it out of the park (no pun intended) with her ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) shot. I've tried this effect but not with the iPhone. Sue made it work.

Sue must have been feeling very creative with her photo of the day because she went wild editing this one, also taken in the park.

feet and shadows

Come evening, I looked out back and spied a pretty nice sunset. By propping my phone on the back fence, I eliminated most of the wires and then edited away the few that I couldn't escape.

Sonnenburg Woods

I knew that there was another entrance to the woods about which I have recently written. In fact, GMaps refers to this entrance as the Sonnenburg Woods. The entrance that we have used twice previously is the St James Woods, but really there is only one woodland, and GMaps does identify this Sonnenburg entrance with St James in brackets: Sonnenburg Woods (St James).

There was no long perimeter path by the Sonnenburg entrance. We were immediately in the woods, and there were various branching trails. The paths included some rocks and roots, causing us to pick our way somewhat carefully, but it was not difficult by any means.

We took phone photos, which is all that I seem to do right now while my Canon lies in state, as it were. There was great contrast of light and dark which resulted in very mediocre photos, but as per usual, a little bit of post processing helped out significantly. I show part of the path, below.

Surprisingly, in places, there were old fences by the path. This is an old fence post, below. The actual fencing didn't turn out so well in this or any other photos, but you may be able to spot a little wire to the bottom right of the post. The shaft of light was an added delight.

Someone has tied markers here and there to help newcomers to find their way back to the parking lot. There is also fencing in this photo that you might see if you try hard.

After the woodsy walk, we picked up coffee and took it to the park. What we didn't do on this occasion was take a selfie. Obviously, this oversight should be cause for concern. However, what I did do was take a picture of a canoe on the river, marking approximately the thirty-ninth-thousandth such photo. Somehow, I can't seem to resist.

The Soul Knows

Hmmph. I wanted to show you a photo of the light prisms that I see on my wall from my chair on some mornings. For some reason, it has disappeared from both my phone cloud and my computer. So, I will leave you with just two things.

One: a Sue and John selfie that I don't think that I have shown you. It's not that you need to see yet another one of the happy couple, but here we all are, so here it is.

Two: I was watching a podcast and had to stop and record this statement. It goes pretty well with what I recently wrote about belief not really being a choice.

You can't ultimately lies to you soul. Your soul knows when things don't feel congruent.

I believe it was said by Simon Mundle although I am not completely sure if it wasn't the other guy on the podcast.

We'll be off for our daily walk soon. How many selfies should we take? 😊😎😉😇🤔

Notes in Passing

Winter is Coming

Although it is unnaturally cold lately after a very hot summer, it is not the current weather that causes me to think of winter. Rather. it is the snow removal contract that landed in my email on the weekend. They will gladly keep my very short driveway cleared for $467 (tax incl). Shauna's drive is about a half car length longer, so she will have to fork out $80 more.

You may recall from last winter that we we were overly blessed with snow, and you may also recall that it accumulated to the point that the pile in the yard grew taller than I. Pushing snow is one thing but lifting it high is another, and then there is the big, heavy pile that the plows leave by the road, and I cannot deal with that anymore.

So, I don't have much choice but to pay the piper, as it were. There are financial costs to aging that people don't think about.

I almost forgot, but there is another sign of winter, Sue ordered and received the wool for her winter afghan project. 

 

Car Troubles

Our 2010 Honda was getting noisy. It had only been 2.5 years since I had done the exhaust completely, and we had driven fewer than 11000km/7000mi in that time. Nevertheless, there was a hole in the pipe, and the costs of repair was more than $550.

ITU

Speaking of expenses for seniors, I went to the expense of purchasing UTI test strips that cost almost $19 for 3 strips. You may recall that they discovered a UTI in that trip to the ER. Or did they?

My last UTI, two years ago, also in August, was a deuce to clear up, so once the meds were finished, I wanted to know if we had contained this one. According to the trips, we hadn't.

I was expecting to be prescribed more antibiotics, but when they cultured the specimen, they did not, strangely enough, find an actual infection. So the test strip is reporting one thing, but the lab results do not concur. I guess that I should see the doc for clarification. 

 

Inconsiderate Dog Owners

I get that people can't help their dogs peeing on lawns. I really do. And our front lawn is so rough, especially in this drought, that I don't mind too much. However, Sue has maintained a lovely pot of flowers near the sidewalk as she has done for years. It's never been a problem before, but a dog peed right on the pot and damaged the flowers. Sue moved that pot to the back of the yard and put another in its place. It was hit again. That is not acceptable.

Speaking of parched grass, I am glad to report, however, that the drought broke yesterday. We had a goodly amount of rain. Is it my imagination, or is it looking greener already?

Back to the Woods

Dear Reader probably wouldn't remember that during the summer we took a walk up to the patch of woods on the north edge of town. It was a hot and buggy walk, so we decided to wait until fall to return. It isn't yet fall, but we've had some cool weather, and once we pass mid-August, the insect plague seems to diminish greatly.

On Tuesday, it was time to try again. Once again, we stuck mostly to the perimeter path.

I had been hoping to spot a lot of chicory, but we only saw the occasional flower.

There was much golden rod, however, and a number of sleeping bees, so they were relatively easy to photograph for once. They were sleeping because it had been a cold night and still a cool morning.

We did duck into the woods briefly. The trail was short, so we soon found ourselves back on the perimeter path. Someday, we shall explore the trails more, but I don't think any will be too long because it is not an very large woodland.

On the way out, we passed a very cool looking old truck that called out to me, so I stopped and took out my phone.

What a beaut! I know from the mat on the cargo bed that it is a 1949 something or other. At the time, I didn't think to check the hood for the make or model.

Finally! Shawarma with the Kids

When they were younger, every now and then we would have shawarmas with the kids at the little park behind town hall. We'd park the car, walk along main street to Lakeside Shawarma, and take our food back to a table by the river.

Look at all of the rock on the far side of the dam. The water is very low.

Somehow, we missed  this ritual last year, but we had this week to get together before school starts up again next week,

The circumstances weren't the best on a cool and windy day with the yellow jackets pestering us. In fact, I got stung really well by one of the blighters. But we made a memory with the kids, and those are getting harder to come by now that we don't see Dani and JJ as much.

We didn’t linger long and left to head to the Blue Spoon for desert, which we consumed while walking. I got the most scrumptious cookie ever! It was a biggish chocolate chip cookie with a bit of sea salt. Baked until perfectly crispy, it was delish. I am not usually a huge cookie guy, but this one was spectacular.

We wandered around main street for a few minutes, but since it was my cane hand that was stung, I put it in the car. I was doing fine without it, but the others still kept the outing short out of consideration. 

We only ventured into one store — Amethyst — where I saw a rather nice amethyst lamp for $229 and a very impressive chunk of amethyst crystal for $600. What a specimen!

It all took place in about and hour and a half or less, but we took one more photo before going our separate ways.

We'll see them again sometime on the weekend for a birthday celebration before school recommences next week. In the meantime, I leave you with one of Sue's collages.

My Deconversion Story

When I posted my recent churchy blogs that I shall link at the end, people seemed very interested in hearing about my faith story or actually loss of faith. 

You know my churchy background by now, but you may not know that I continued to be a very committed Christian until my mid-30s. In point of fact, there was a time when I thought of leaving teaching to retrain as a minister. 

In those years after our marriage in 1969, Sue and I attended various evangelical churches — Pentecostal, Free Methodist, Associated Gospel, and even the occasional Baptist service. This lasted into the 1980s. I loved being an evangelical Christian, and church music is still what plays in my head more than any other. The music still gives me feelings or at least memories of feelings.

Near the end of my faith period, I led a little couples bible study of just 3 couples. It was great. We all enjoyed our times together. When the sessions concluded because one couple was moving away, one of the guys loaned me a set of creationist tapes. At the end of the tapes, the presenter went on about the continents zooming around after the flood, just 4000 years ago.

I knew enough about the study of plate tectonics to realize that was balderdash. However, it shouldn't have affected me because I hadn't been a young earth creationist to begin with. I knew the earth was old, but believed in guided evolution or Intelligent Design as they call it now. I knew that it had been 200 million years since the planets were together in the form of Pangea and that they have been moving to their present position for all of that time and that they are still on the move. While I won't go into it, the science is irrefutable. 

All along, I had known about geologic time yet still also believed the gospel. Science and belief were not incompatible in my mind. However, it was realizing the absurdity of the claim that the continents had shifted dramatically just a few thousand years ago that made me think of time differently. It suddenly hit me that, geologically speaking, the earth hadn't required divine intervention for 200 million years. Geology just grinded on and on. I had never thought of it this way. 

I realized that the planet hadn't needed a guiding god for 200 million years. That's a rather long time.

As people and Christians, we have this notion that we are special and that god created us with a special purpose. If that were the case, he really took his time getting around to creating humans. And it wasn't just 200 million years but actually 4.5 billion years that our planet had existed. And then . . . when you figure that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the notion of the earth and humans being specially created at the whim of a god suddenly made no sense to me.

That was it. I stopped believing in that instant. It wasn't deliberate; I couldn't help myself. For many EXvangelicals, deconstruction is a long and panful journey. They struggle mightily to find reasons to hang onto their faith, but in the end they cannot. That wasn't my experience. I believed in one moment and not in the next. I had no control over this. You can't force yourself to believe what you don't believe.

Although I had loved being a Christian, I no longer believed after that sudden and unanticipated momentary flash of insight. There was nothing more to my deconversion. Christians tend to assume that ex-believers were unhappy about their, perhaps, restricted lifestyles, but that wasn't true for me or for others whom I have encountered. 

For many, deconstruction is a most painful journey. For me, the shift was instantaneous and natural. I still attended church with the family for some time afterward and not unhappily.

I am not sad about having once believed or having been raised the way that I was. I am not mad at a god whom I don't believe exists. I simply don't believe although, oddly enough, I still love to sing the songs of Zion, as some might call them. Gospel music is the main music in my head, which I know is weird for an atheist.

What I I don't remember from those days is evangelicalism being as mean-spirited or so anti-intellectual. We graduated scholars from my youth group: scientists, doctors, professors and mere teachers like me. My late brother-in-law, for example, was a highly intelligent and educated professor who believed deeply. Non-belief isn't a matter of intelligence, but I suspect it is often a matter of being honest about confronting truth and reality.

I think that we come to the end of this sequence of posts at last. I hope that I have answered your questions.

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For the record, these are the posts that led to this one.

Remembering the Foo

Evangel Temple

It Bagan on Drummond Street

Onto the Queensway